1. Dr. Lee Spetner first made this allegation in a meeting of orthodox Jewish scientists held in Jerusalem in July 1980. Spetner studied the British Museum specimen in June 1978 and explained the discrepancies to Dr. Alan Charig, the museum’s Chief Curator of Fossil Amphibians, Reptiles, and Birds. [See “Is the Archaeopteryx a Fake?” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 20, September 1983, pp. 121–122.] Charig has consistently denied a forgery.

Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe provide color photographs and the most complete description of this evidence of a fraud in Archaeopteryx, the Primordial Bird: A Case of Fossil Forgery (Swansea, England: Christopher Davies, Ltd., 1986). This book also responds to counterclaims that Archaeopteryx was not a forgery.

3. Some defenders of Archaeopteryx claim that three other specimens also have feathers—the Teyler Museum specimen, the EichstÃ¤tt specimen, and the poorly preserved Maxberg specimen. Hoyle, Wickramasinghe, and Watkins put it bluntly. “Only people in an exceptional condition of mind can see them.” [F. Hoyle, N. C. Wickramasinghe, and R. S. Watkins, “Archaeopteryx,”The British Journal of Photography, 21 June 1985, p. 694.]

4. “... these specimens [of Archaeopteryx] are not particularly like modern birds at all. If feather impressions had not been preserved in the London and Berlin specimens, they [the other specimens] never would have been identified as birds. Instead, they would unquestionably have been labeled as coelurosaurian dinosaurs [such as Compsognathus]. Notice that the last three specimens to be recognized [as Archaeopteryx] were all misidentified at first, and the EichstÃ¤tt specimen for 20 years was thought to be a small specimen of the dinosaur Compsognathus.” John H. Ostrom, “The Origin of Birds,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Vol. 3, 1975, p. 61.

u “Apart from the proportions of its wings, the skeleton of Archaeopteryx is strikingly similar to that of a small, lightly built, running dinosaur, such as the coelurosaur Compsognathus.” Dougal Dixon et al., The Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1988), p. 172.

5. “It’s been a good run for Archaeopteryx. For the past 150 years, the famous feathered fossil species from Bavaria in Germany has been a symbol of evolution, a textbook example of a transitional fossil and, above all, the oldest and most primitive bird. On page 465 of this issue, however, Xu and colleagues present a newly discovered Archaeopteryx-like species named Ziaotingia zhengi that rearranges the branches on the phylogentic tree of bird-like theropod dinosaurs, knocking Archaeopteryx (Fig. 1) off its celebrated perch and moving it and its kin into the great unwashed ranks of ‘non avian’ dinosaurs.” Lawrence M. Witmer, “An Icon Knocked from Its Perch,” Nature, Vol. 458, 28 July 2011, p. 458.

u “Phylogenetic analysis of stem-group birds reveals that Archaeopteryx is no more closely related to modern birds than are several types of theropod dinosaurs, including tyrannosaurids and ornithomimids. Archaeopteryx is not an ancestral bird, nor is it an ‘ideal intermediate’ between reptiles and birds. There are no derived characters uniquely shared by Archaeopteryx and modern birds alone; consequently there is little justification for continuing to classify Archaeopteryx as a bird.” R. A. Thulborn, “The Avian Relationships of Archaeopteryx and the Origin of Birds,” Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, Vol. 82, 1984, p. 119.

10. Two milligram-size samples of the fossil material were tested, one from a “feather” region and a control sample from a nonfeathered region. The British Museum “contends that the amorphous nature of the feathered material is an artifact explainable by preservatives that they have put on the fossil.” [Lee M. Spetner, “Discussion,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship, 1990), p. 289.] If this excuse were correct, why were no “preservatives” found on the control specimen? Control specimens are tested for precisely this purpose—to dispel unique, last-minute excuses. The British Museum has refused further testing, a shocking position for a scientific organization, and one which raises suspicions to the breaking point.

11. “Exactly 1 year ago, paleontologists were abuzz about photos of a so-called “feathered dinosaur,” ... But at this year’s vertebrate paleontology meeting in Chicago late last month, the verdict was a bit different: The structures are not modern feathers, say the roughly half-dozen Western paleontologists who have seen the specimens. [Instead, they are ‘bristlelike fibers.’]” Ann Gibbons, “Plucking the Feathered Dinosaur,” Science, Vol. 278, 14 November 1997, p. 1229.

u The media frequently reports that some dinosaurs had feathers. Alan Feduccia, a bird expert and evolutionist, when asked about this replied:

People have accepted that these filamentous structures—dino fuzz—represent proto-feathers. But these things do not resemble feathers, and I don’t think they have anything to do with feathers. To me, they look like preserved skin fibers. Alan Feduccia, “Plucking Apart the Dino-Birds,” Discover, Vol. 24, February 2003, p. 16.

15. “The ‘Archaeoraptor’ fossil, once proclaimed as a key intermediate between carnivorous dinosaurs and birds but now known to be a forgery, is a chimaera formed of bird and dromaeosaur parts.” Zhonghe Zhou et al., “Archaeoraptor’s Better Half,” Nature, Vol. 420, 21 November 2002, p. 285.

17. “Specialists and collectors around the world have long decried the flood of sham fossils pouring out of China.” Richard Stone, “Altering the Past: China’s Faked Fossils Problem,” Science, Vol. 330, 24 December 2010, p. 1740.

19. “And let us squarely face the dinosaurness of birds and the birdness of the Dinosauria. When the Canada geese honk their way northward, we can say: ‘The dinosaurs are migrating, it must be spring!’ ” Robert T. Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1986), p. 462.